In “Adam,” which premiered last August, Sheng plays Ethan, a young trans man so emotionally grounded that he becomes the ballast for the cis characters flailing all around him, thus flipping a trans narrative trope. Sheng, now 23, recognizes the potential for social and political change in acting: Through characters like Ethan and Micah, he’s helping Hollywood revise its depictions of trans men, catching up to trans lives as they’re actually lived. Society has a long and unfortunate history of gazing at and fetishizing trans women, but that has been less the case with trans men. “Trans women have historically been more visible,” Graf says. From 2016 to 2018, Fletcher took on three consecutive trans roles that, viewed together, proved groundbreaking.

Source: New York Times February 04, 2020 18:56 UTC